The Return…… (full title The Return of the Darkness and Evil) is the second studio album by Swedish extreme metal band Bathory. It was released on 27 May 1985, through Black Mark in Sweden and Combat Records in the US. The Return…… had a significant influence on developing the black metal and death metal genres.[1]
Background
Quorthon explained the album title as such: "We wanted people to just read out The Return…… – as in a second album or a follow-up – and then flip the album over to look for a tracking list. Not finding one, what they got was this apocalyptic poem with the song titles woven into it. Only after listening through the album to the end would you get the full title of the album, The Return of the Darkness and Evil".[2]
Since its release, the album has received acclaim as a landmark of the first wave of black metal, along with their self titled-debut and third album, Under the Sign of the Black Mark. Eduardo Rivadavia of Allmusic wrote of the album, "Like their eponymous debut of a year before, Bathory's 1985 sophomore effort, The Return......, was an unbelievably coarse proto-black metal album influenced almost exclusively by the earlier works of Venom. But make no mistake: such was the genre's state of infancy at the time that, even though it was once again recorded under the most inadequate of circumstances at the auto repair garage Quorthon sympathetically baptized Heavenshore Studios, the album's impact still proved nothing short of revolutionary."
^"Interview: Darkthrone (Fenriz)". Isolation Grind.com. 5 September 2013. Archived from the original on 21 December 2016. Retrieved 17 February 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^Zebub, Bill. "Darkthrone". The Grimoire.com. Retrieved 17 February 2017.
